Audio encoding is commonly employed in apparatus for storing or transmitting a digital audio signal. A high compression ratio enables better storage capacity or more efficient transmission through a channel. However, it is also important to maintain the perceptual quality of the compressed signal.
There may be good correlation between a low frequency region and a higher frequency region of an audio signal. This may be utilized for example by using a bandwidth extension technique, which instead of encoding the signal of the high frequency region aims to model the high frequency region by using a copy of a signal at the low frequency region and adjusting the copied spectral envelope to match the high frequency region. Another example is spectral band replication (SBR) coding, which proposes that a higher frequency spectral band should not itself be coded/decoded but should be replicated based on a pre-selected segment from a decoded lower frequency spectral band. However, these methods only try to maintain the overall shape of the spectral envelope at the high frequency region, whereas the fine structure of the original spectrum, which may be quite different is not considered.
An intermediate form between conventional spectral coding and bandwidth extension is to adaptively copy selected portions of a lower frequency spectral band to model the higher frequency spectral band. WOO7072088 teaches dividing the higher frequency spectral band into smaller spectral sub bands. During encoding, systematic searches are used to find the portions of the larger lower frequency spectral band of the audio signal that are most similar to the smaller higher frequency spectral sub bands. A higher frequency spectral sub band can then be parametrically encoded by providing a parameter that identifies the most similar portion of the larger lower frequency spectral band. The searches may be computationally intensive. At decoding, the provided parameter is used to replicate the appropriate portions of the lower frequency spectral band in the appropriate higher frequency spectral sub bands.